Activist hedge fund Saba Capital has rejected claims that it is acting unreasonably in its standoff with Impax Environmental Markets PLC, insisting that its demands are rooted in shareholder protection rather than brinkmanship.
The dispute escalated after Impax chair Glen Suarez warned that the board could pursue an exit tender offer — a move that would effectively wind up the £811m environmental investment trust — if Saba does not back a previously proposed continuation tender. Saba holds around 22% of Impax after building its stake in late 2025.
From Saba’s perspective, the issue is straightforward: it is prepared to tender its shares, but only if Impax agrees to cover the full costs of the tender for all shareholders who wish to exit. In a statement issued after Suarez’s open letter, the hedge fund said this position reflects its fiduciary duty to ensure that investors are not penalised for choosing to leave a chronically underperforming vehicle.
“For Saba, this decision was guided purely by our duty to hold management accountable to act in shareholders’ best interests by covering the costs of this exit,” the firm said in a statement , pushing back against Impax’s characterisation of its stance as obstructive.
Suarez had argued that Saba’s insistence on Impax footing all costs, including stamp duty, was “unreasonable” and unprecedented, and warned that rejecting the continuation tender left the board with little choice but to pursue a full exit tender.
Saba, however, countered that Impax’s board is deflecting attention from deeper governance and performance issues. The hedge fund criticised what it described as structural flaws in the UK non-executive director model, arguing that boards too often serve asset managers rather than shareholders and the investment’s trust’s poor performance versus its benchmark.
“Over the past five years, IEM’s share price return (+2.3%) disastrously lagged its benchmark, the MSCI ACWI Index (+85.3%), by 83%. On a three-year basis, IEM’s share price return (+4.9%) lagged the benchmark (+59.2%) by more than 54%,” Saba said in a statement.
